Indeed, it may be remarked, since Kepler's name is mentioned, that astronomers were far better off in Catholic Italy than in Protestant Germany; for while Galileo was teaching in peace and honor from his professor's chair at Padua, Kepler and Tycho Brahe met for the first time at Prague. Protestant exiles from Protestant lands, they found in the munificent protection of Rudolph safe asylum and an appreciation of their scientific merits denied them at home.
Tycho Brahe.
Hostility was excited against Brahe at the court of Denmark, and, on the ground of an exhausted treasury and the inutility of his studies, he was degraded from his office, deprived of his canonry, his pension, and his Norwegian estate, and both his wife and family obliged to seek shelter in a foreign land. His injuries and sufferings preyed upon his mind, and he survived only two years the shameful treatment he had received at the hands of his Lutheran countrymen. Lalande, in referring to the persecution of Tycho Brahe, holds up the Minister Walchendorf to execration and infamy.
Kepler
was forced to leave home, to accept a professorship at the Catholic University of Gratz. Why? Wolfgang Menzel informs us, (Geschichte der Deutschen, vol. ii. p. 645:) "The theologians of Tübingen condemned his discovery, because the Bible teaches that the sun revolves about the earth, and not the earth about the sun. He was about to suppress his book, when an asylum was opened at Gratz. The Jesuits, who better knew how to prize his scientific talent, retained him, although he openly avowed his Lutheranism. It was only at home that he suffered persecution, and it was with difficulty that he succeeded in saving his own mother from being burnt alive as a witch." [Footnote 129]
[Footnote 129: For other remarkable features of this persecution, see Johann Kepler's Leben und Werken, von G. L. C. Freiherrn von Breitschwert.]
If we maybe permitted such homely phrase, English literature "draws it very mild" when obliged to refer to the shameful treatment of Kepler and Tycho Brahe. Their persecutors were the Protestant theologians of Tübingen, and the Lutheran ministers of the Danish court. Consequently, these barbarous transactions are always delicately alluded to when not suppressed, and are but little known. If these preachers had been Roman priests and cardinals—ah! then indeed! As astronomer, Kepler's first task was to draw up the Styrian Calendar for 1594. This only served to add fuel to the flames of the wrath of the Würtemberg divines, inasmuch as Kepler used the Gregorian calendar. Having no antipathy to popes as such, he was willing to take the good and the useful without asking whence it came, and gladly used the better measure of time.
The Academic Senate straightway addressed Duke Louis in protest against the introduction of the detested papal calendar; and their memorial is so eminently characteristic and comical that we cannot deny our readers the enjoyment of its perusal. Here it is:
"A Christian, sensible, and good-hearted governor knows that in reformations of this kind he should take counsel of the ministers of the church. As long as the kings of Judah followed the counsel of the prophets and other highly enlightened ministers of the church, they ruled laudably and well—pleasing unto God. It is only when the temporal power is in a member of the true church of God that it has authority, with the counsel of the ministers of the church, to change the outward ceremonies of the church.